Бесплатный фрагмент - The man who did not be

The Man Who DID NOT BE

Zohar Leo Palfi

From the author

This book began with a simple but frightening question: what would be left of us if our memories were taken away?

WHAT IF YOUR LOVE IS JUST A BUG IN THE SYSTEM?

We live in a world where our entire lives — photos, correspondence, stories — are stored on servers, in the cloud, as zeros and ones. We trust digital ghosts to keep our souls safe. But what if one day they decide that some part of it shouldn’t exist? What if one day you wake up and the most important person in your life is just a broken file that the system decided to delete?

This story is about a love that is stronger than a 404 error. About fighting for the right to remember in a world that desperately wants to forget and simplify everything. It’s a journey into the heart of what makes us human: our scars, our losses, our imperfect but infinitely precious memories.

I don’t know if Kael is real. But his pain is. I hope you feel it.

And maybe after reading this, you’ll hug the ones you love a little tighter.

Just in case.

Kael Vance is a data archaeologist. His job is to resurrect dead data. His world is a perfect, verified reality. His life is Elara.

But one morning he wakes up in a world where Elara never existed.

All records have been erased. All memories of loved ones are blank. The empty photo frame on his desk is the only evidence of his rapidly slipping sanity. The system says he was always alone.

But Kael remembers. He remembers her laugh, her touch, her scent. That memory is the only thing he has left, and it’s his death sentence.

Because they’re coming for him. Faceless Purifiers whose job it is to erase mistakes in reality. And Kael is the biggest mistake of all.

To survive and prove that his love was real, he’ll have to plunge into the digital underground, trust those who trust no one, and learn the terrible truth: reality doesn’t disappear. It is being forgotten.

“The Man Who DID NOT BE” is a dizzying sci-fi thriller where “The Matrix” collides with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” A novel that will make you question your own memories. Are you ready to remember?

Table of Contents:

Book One: STATIC

— Chapter 1: The smell of coffee and ozone

— Chapter 2: Failure in the Sea of Data

— Chapter 3: An empty frame and videotapes

— Chapter 4: The Forgotten Signal Bar

— Chapter 5: The Anamnesis Message

— Chapter 6: The hunter in the industrial zone

— Chapter 7: Analog Weapons

— Chapter 8: The Half Shadow Hotel and Dr. Lee’s journal.

— Chapter 9: Siege and escape through the garbage chute

— Chapter 10: A ghost technician named Raven.

— Chapter 11: Lair in the Pneumatic Tube

— Chapter 12: Fighting in the Tunnels

— Chapter 13: The Station Dungeons and the Second Key

— Chapter 14: Quarantine

— Chapter 15: The War of the Two Ghosts

— Chapter 16: Jumping on a Train

— Chapter 17: The Observatory and the Last Guardian

— Chapter 18: An Eye in the Universe (Epilogue of Book One)

Book Two: THE SILENT SKY

— Chapter 19: New World Physics and Lee’s Plan

— Chapter 20: Traveling the fading earth

— Chapter 21: The Artist Who Paints the Void

— Chapter 22: The Principle of Resonance

— Chapter 23: Concert Hall by the Sea

— Chapter 24: The Silence Between the Notes

— Chapter 25: Sacrifice of the Lyre

— Chapter 26: Library of Zero

— Chapter 27: The Truth About Elara

— Chapter 28: The Principle of Choice

Book Three: THE ISLANDS OF REALITY

— Chapter 29: Reassembling the Anchor

— Chapter 30: Point Zero and New Allies

— Chapter 31: The Battle with Titan

— Chapter 32: The Cult of Silence

— Chapter 33: Ghost Ark

— Chapter 34: Return to the Dead City

— Chapter 35: The Final Confrontation

— Chapter 36: The Gray Sky (Finale)

Prologue

Dr. Ahrimann Lee knew that they were coming for her.

That knowledge wasn’t paranoia. It was cold, mathematically verified fact. She herself had created the system that now hunted her.

She stood in her lab on the 112th floor of the Nexus Tower. Outside the panoramic window lay the nighttime city, an endless tapestry of neon rivers and glowing dots. Beautiful. Orderly. Perfect. And built on the lies she’d helped create.

On her desk lay a small crystal chip. The first component of the Anchor. Next to it, a communicator showing a map of the city with a single blinking dot. Gamma-7 industrial zone. An old, godforsaken place. The perfect mailbox.

She had to hurry.

“They’re already on the floor, Dr. Lee,” came the calm, synthesized voice of her assistant, David, in her ear. He wasn’t in the room. He was online, her eyes and ears.

“How many are there?” — She asked, not taking her eyes off the chip.

“Three. Walking down the main corridor. The movements are… synchronized. The Security Corps can’t see them. The corridor is empty to them.”

Ahrimann grinned bitterly. Of course it doesn’t see them. They weren’t moving in physical space. They were moving in data space, simply overwriting their coordinates. Her own technology.

She picked up the chip. Cold, smooth. Part of her hope in it. Part of her monstrous mistake.

“David, activate the blank slate protocol. Complete wipe of all data on this terminal. Reboot the server core in three minutes.”

“Copy that. This is going to be… noisy.”

“I’m counting on it. I need to distract them.”

She walked over to the wall, touched a panel. The wall silently moved aside, revealing a secret service elevator not mapped on any schematics of the building. Her escape route.

“They’re at the lab door,” David reported. — They’re not trying to break through it. They’re… going through it.”

Ahrimann saw it on the security monitor. Three figures in strict suits simply walked through the titanium door like ghosts. Their faces were smooth, serene, devoid of features. Agents of Static. Cleaners. They had come for the anomaly. For her.

She stepped into the elevator.

“David,” she said one last time. — Thank you for everything.”

“It’s been an honor working with you, Dr. Lee. Goodbye.”

The elevator doors began to close. Through the gap, she saw three figures turn their faceless heads in her direction. They had spotted her.

One of them raised his hand, and his fingers began to disintegrate into shimmering particles.

The elevator tore downward.

Three seconds later, her lab on the 112th floor exploded, turning into a ball of fire. Not from explosives. From data overload. Millions of terabytes of information released simultaneously created a blast of pure energy that blew out the panoramic windows and painted the night sky white.

Ahrimann Lee was carried down into the darkness, clutching a tiny crystal chip to her chest.

She had escaped. For the time being.

She knew that Static would be looking for her now. But she also knew she had left a decoy. A far more interesting and important anomaly.

A man whose memory was the only thing that mattered. A man who didn’t yet know that his world was a ticking bomb.

A man named Kael Vance.

She’d sent him the key. Now all she could do was hope he was strong enough to use it. Or crazy enough to survive.

The elevator stopped in the dungeons of the city. She stepped out into the darkness, alone against the system she herself had spawned. Her personal war had just begun.

And the war for Kael Vance’s soul was due to begin in a few weeks. With the simple smell of coffee and ozone.

Book One: STATICS

Chapter 1

The morning smelled of two things: real, dirt-grown Colombian coffee and ozone from her work terminal. To Kael Vance, it was the smell of home, and he wouldn’t trade it for any of the flavorings their Comfort 3000 kitchen system offered.

He stood barefoot on the cool polymer floor, watching the slow, thick drops fall into the glass flask of the Kemex. Water heated to ninety-three degrees Celsius — no more and no less — passed through the freshly ground grains, releasing hundreds of shades of flavor. Chocolate, notes of citrus, something nutty. It was his morning ritual, his little analog meditation in a world that had long ago traded rituals for efficiency.

In a world where 99% of food and drink was printed on food synthesizers on the command “Alice, make me a latte,” this process was an act of quiet rebellion. Real beans he ordered from South Block smugglers. A hand grinder with ceramic millstones. A paper filter. A process that couldn’t be sped up or optimized. It drove his inner data archaeologist crazy, who was used to the fact that any task could be broken down into subroutines and completed a thousand times faster. But it also soothed the man in him who clung desperately to things he could touch, smell, and feel.

— You’re fiddling with your witch potion again,” came a sleepy, slightly mocking voice behind him. It was warm, with the slight huskiness she always had in the mornings.

He turned around, unable to stop slowly pouring water in a spiral. Elara was standing in the bedroom doorway, wrapped in his old, stretched out t-shirt with the faded OmniTech Archives logo on it. The t-shirt was too big for her, bunching up ridiculously at the shoulders and revealing her long legs. Her short-cropped blonde hair was tangled from sleep, sticking out in all directions like the feathers of a disheveled bird. There were freckles on the bridge of her nose, which she always wrinkled when she was displeased or deep in thought. He adored those freckles. He thought they were constellations that could only be read by getting up close.

— It’s not a potion. It’s art,” he objected, smiling. The smile came of its own accord, easy and natural. He was always smiling around her. — And what you’re drinking is a Class B suspension with coffee-vanilla-cappuccino-alpha flavoring and stabilizer E-745. I checked the composition. It’s got more polymers in it than your sneakers.

— But my polymer poison shows up in three seconds on voice command,” she walked over, hugged him from behind, and rested her chin on his shoulder. Her body was warm and soft. She smelled like sleep, her skin, and something subtly floral-the scent of the shampoo she’d also ordered from underground “analog” vendors. — And your art requires the sacrifice of ten minutes of precious morning sleep. Ten minutes, Kael. In that time, we can analyze the genome and breed a new species of glowfish.

— The world doesn’t need new glowfish,” he muttered, finishing the spill. — The world needs good coffee.

He put the kettle on and put the lid on the kemex, letting the drink ‘breathe’. He could feel her steady breathing against his neck. Those quiet morning moments were his anchor. Everything else-work, the city, the endless sea of data-was somewhere out there, beyond the walls of their small apartment on the seventy-third floor. And here was the center of his universe.

— What do you have today? — She asked, not letting go of him.

— The Helios Crypt. A logistical manifesto from a hundred years ago. I’ll spend all day poring over rusty digital invoices and parts lists for ancient ion engines. Boring as hell. Every data necromancer’s dream.

— Don’t say that,” she pinched his side lightly. — You’re not going through rusty overheads. You’re saving oblivion from oblivion. You listen to the whispers of the dead. You give them back their stories.

That’s what she always said. She saw hidden poetry, metaphysics in everything. To him, it was just a job. Complicated, requiring the utmost concentration, like clearing an ancient information field, but a job nonetheless. He saw zeros and ones, which had to be added up correctly. She saw them as destinies.

He poured coffee into two cups. His — black, matte, austere. And hers, a ridiculous, pudgy one with a silly drawing of a cat in a spacesuit riding a comet. It was his first purchase for their shared apartment. He’d found it at a flea market in Old Town, and it squealed with delight like a baby.

— And you? “Saving the world in your secret lab again?” -he asked, holding out a cup to her.

Elara worked in the R&D department of Nexus Corporation, a division that dealt with something so complex that even its names sounded like incantations: “cognitive architecture,” “next-generation interfaces,” “collective database optimization.” He knew only in general terms that her team was trying to create a new type of neural network based not on individual consciousness but on collective consciousness. A network that could combine the thoughts and experiences of thousands of people into a single, self-learning organism. It sounded impressive, utopian, and a little creepy.

She rarely talked about work, citing a nondisclosure agreement that even his love wouldn’t save her from. But sometimes, late at night, he’d wake up and see the light from her terminal. She would sit hunched over, drawing complex, fractal-like diagrams in her electronic notebook, her eyes burning with the kind of fire that only geniuses or madmen have. Kael still hadn’t decided which category she fell into.

— “Something like that,” she took the cup and sipped his witch’s potion carefully. She wrinkled her nose, but took another sip. She always did that, like it was a favor to him. — We have a big breakthrough today. Or a big failure. The line, as always, is thin. We’re running basic protocol. The first simulation of Anamnesis.

She said the word — Anamnesis — almost in a whisper, with a kind of sacred awe.

— If it worked, it would change everything. The way we learn, communicate, remember. Imagine, Kael,’ she looked up at him, and her eyes sparkled, ‘you wouldn’t have to dig through dusty archives anymore. You’d be able to just… plug in and feel. Feel what it was like to be an engineer on the Helios a hundred years ago. Relive his memories, his experiences.

— Sounds like a way to go crazy,” he muttered. — I prefer my memories to stay mine. And other people’s are behind a thick wall of encryption.

She sighed. This was their eternal argument. His analog conservatism versus her digital radicalism.

She set her cup down and looked at him again, and this time her gaze was serious, devoid of morning playfulness.

— Kael. If… if anything goes wrong today…

— Hey,” he interrupted her, setting his cup down and taking her face in his palms. Her skin was warm and smooth. He forced her to look into his eyes. — It’s going to go like this. You’re the smartest woman I know. You can rewrite the laws of physics just by frowning. Your Anamnesis will work.”

She smiled, but the smile didn’t touch her eyes. There was an unease in them, a deep, dark unease he hadn’t noticed before. Or didn’t want to notice.

— Just… remember that I love you,” she whispered. Her voice trembled. — Remember that. No matter what. Promise?

— I promise,” he kissed her. First on her lips, then on her favorite freckles on the bridge of her nose. — I love you, too. More than real coffee.

— That’s a big statement,” she laughed, and the tension seemed to subside. She was his Elara again. — All right, I’ve got to go. Great things don’t wait.

She dressed quickly, a strict corporate suit made of a smart fabric that adjusted itself to her figure and temperature. The look contrasted so much with her domestic dishevelment that Kael felt as if he had two wives. One for him. The other for the rest of the world.

Another kiss at the door, quick, promising.

— I’ll see you tonight. We’ll order Chinese noodles. Real noodles. From that shop in Old Town.

— Deal,” he nodded. — With beef and too much hot sauce.

— That’s the one.

The door closed behind her. The smart lock clicked quietly.

Kael stood in the silence of the ensuing solitude. He finished his perfect, hand-brewed coffee. It was bitter, but the aftertaste was sweet. He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was time. Time to dive into the world of the dead.

He made his way to his office, a small room that Elara jokingly referred to as the “engine room.” The walls were hidden behind racks of servers, and there was a constant quiet hum of cooling systems in the air. In the center of the room, looking like a futuristic throne or torture tool, stood his Dive-7 work chair.

He sat down. Mechanical manipulators gently but insistently locked his arms and legs. The neurointerface helmet slid down over his head, and cold gel contacts pressed into his temples. He took a deep breath, banishing the image of Elara’s worried eyes from his mind. The job required total concentration.

— AURA, activation,” he said into the void.

“Good morning, Kael,” the smooth, emotionless, perfectly calibrated female voice of his personal Artificial Intelligence echoed in his head. — Your biometric readings are normal. Pulse 65. Cortisol levels are slightly elevated. I recommend an after-work meditation session.”

— Copy that, AURA. Target is Helios Archive, Sector 73-Gamma. Downloading data-archaeology protocols. Let’s go.

The world dissolved.

Body sensation, weight, temperature, odor — all vanished, replaced by a boundless, dark void. And then the void exploded with information.

He was in the Sea of Data. And he was home.

Chapter 2

The world dissolved.

The feel of his body, the weight, the temperature, the smell of coffee, the quiet hum of the servers-all vanished, replaced by a boundless, dark void. For a moment, Kael ceased to exist. He was pure consciousness, a dot in nowhere. And then the void exploded with information.

He was in a Sea of Data.

It wasn’t just a visual interface that was broadcast to his brain. It was a complete sensory substitution. The Sea of Data had no top or bottom. It was an ocean of pure meaning, where gravity was replaced by relevance and distance by the number of logical connections. To the untrained mind, it would have been an instant, all-consuming psychosis. For Kael, it was work. It was his element.

His consciousness, separated from his corporeal shell, spread out in a fine, sensitive net. He didn’t “see” information in the usual sense. He sensed it. Old, stable archives felt like dense, warm currents. Corrupted data — like cold, prickly reefs against which consciousness could be stabbed. Viruses and defense programs were like predatory, swift shadows on the periphery of perception, hunter fish in this bottomless ocean.

He ignored them, moving toward his goal. The crypt of Helios. He could feel it — a vast, ancient accumulation of data, archived over a century ago. It felt like a sunken galleon, resting at unthinkable depths, covered in the ooze of outdated encryption protocols.

“Making contact with the archive,” AURA announced. Her voice was background, part of his expanded consciousness, like the instrument panel on a pilot. — Data corruption level — 7.3%. Structural integrity at 89%. Residual traces of Cerberus 3.0 defense system detected. The system is inactive, but its subroutines could cause cascading errors if accessed carelessly.”

— Roger that, AURA. Bypass Cerberus using the Silent Step protocol. I don’t want any surprises.

He carefully, like a sapper, pulled the thread of his consciousness to the outer shell of the archive. He fumbled for the “seam” — the place where the data packets were sealed. It was a delicate job. Too much pressure and the archive could collapse into an unreadable mess. Too weak and he’d slide across its surface for eternity.

He’d found a vulnerability. An old access port that Helios engineers had forgotten to close. He’d gotten inside.

The world changed. He found himself in a giant, silent cathedral. “Columns” of system logs went off into infinite heights. “Stained glass windows” were matrices of financial reports, shimmering all shades of green. The air was dense, smelling of dust and cooled silicon. Here, unlike the turbulent outer Sea, there was peace. The peace of a graveyard.

His task was to find the logistical manifest for a particular cycle. He began sifting through the data, discarding the unnecessary. Accounting reports, personnel files, meeting minutes, blueprints… Millions and millions of files, stories, lives reduced to zeros and ones. He was a necromancer searching for one particular skeleton in a giant crypt.

Hour after hour passed. His real body in the chair was motionless, but his mind was doing titanic work. He was completely absorbed in the process, his mind working like a perfect, fine-tuned machine. He was about to find what he was looking for, a massive but badly damaged file with the right labeling.

That was why he’d noticed it.

It wasn’t a bug in the code. Not a corrupted file. It was… a note. One wrong, foreign note in the perfect requiem symphony of data. Something that couldn’t, shouldn’t be here.

A small, flickering packet of information that didn’t belong in the Helios archive. It was encrypted using an entirely different protocol, one that was unfamiliar to him. And it felt… warm. Alive.

Any other data archaeologist would have ignored it as random trash stuck to the archive. But Kael was a perfectionist. The anomaly demanded study.

He carefully isolated the package from the rest of the array and reached out to examine it.

And the moment his consciousness touched the package, it exploded. Not with data. But a feeling. Pure, concentrated, distilled feeling.

Sunlight on her face, so bright she squinted. Freckles on the bridge of her nose that she hated and he loved to kiss. The laugh that sounded like the tinkling of little silver bells when he said something stupid about coffee.

Her voice, not just a sound but a vibration in his chest, “Just remember that I love you. No matter what. Promise?”

It was a memory. His own. Today’s. This morning.

But it was distorted. Passed through some strange, amplifying filter. It was too bright, too clear. Hyperreal. Like a retouched photograph that is prettier but less true than the original. It was missing the small, imperfect details of a real memory: the dust specks dancing in the sunlight, the subtle tiredness in her eyes, the background noise of city traffic outside the window. It was an idealized, sterile replica.

Kael instinctively jerked his consciousness away as if from fire. His real body in the chair twitched convulsively, and the security system howled a piercing red signal in the periphery of his mental vision. He ignored it. His heart, even here in the incorporeal world, was pounding at breakneck speed, disrupting the smooth rhythm of the dive.

What was this? A psychotropic trap? Some new kind of virus, attacking not the system but the operator’s mind directly?

“AURA! — he mentally shouted, his calmness swept away like a house of cards. — What was that! Analyze the last stream! Now!”

“Analyzing,” AURA’s voice was as calm as ever, but it seemed to Kael that there was a delay of a fraction of a nanosecond. As if she had encountered something that didn’t fit into her algorithms. — No anomalies detected in the data structure of the Helios archive. The package you touched is not part of the archive. Its signature is unknown. It self-destructed after contact with your consciousness. You may have experienced neural feedback caused by overexertion. Your biometric readings indicate a surge of adrenaline.”

“It wasn’t feedback,” Kael retorted. — It was my memory. Mine. A morning one. It shouldn’t be here. It shouldn’t be...like this.”

He tried to find the words. So redacted.

“Check the status of Elara Vance,” he ordered. — My wife. Her work terminal in the Nexus. Her current location by network ID.”

A pause.

It was long this time. Unbearably long. A full second. In the Sea of Data, where processes are measured in femtoseconds, it was an eternity. Kael could feel AURA sending queries, its tentacles penetrating the global network, its tentacles scouring through trillions of records in search of the one.

He waited for a response, “Elara Vance is in her office,” or “Her communicator signal has locked on to Sector Beta-3.” He waited for any ordinary, mundane response.

“Search complete,” AURA finally replied.

And in her perfectly even, synthesized voice, Kael heard something new for the first time in their ten years together. Something that had never been there, and could never be there.

A glitch. Not technical, but logical. The sound of a program producing a result that contradicted its own fundamental axiom.

“There is not, nor has there ever been, any record of a person named Elara Vance on the global network.”

The words weren’t a scream. They were silence. Emptiness. They fell into Kael’s mind like a stone into a bottomless well. He waited for an echo, but there was none.

“Error, AURA,” his mental voice was surprisingly calm. The voice of a man talking to a malfunctioning machine that had just given him live fish instead of coffee. — Repeat the scan. You misinterpreted the request. Use my personal identifiers. Marital status: Married. Spouse: Elara Vance, ID number 730-Gamma Epsilon. That can’t be off the grid.”

He called her number from memory without thinking. He remembered it better than his own. He’d entered it a thousand times: when applying for insurance, when buying tickets, when filling out tax returns.

The pause again. Kael could feel it physically now. He could feel AURA straining all its resources as it ran the query over and over, trying to find the error in its own calculations.

“Kael,” AURA’s voice returned, and now there was a distinct tinge of… confusion. As if the program had encountered an unsolvable paradox that threatened to cascade into failure. — I searched all available archives, including Red-level government databases and historical records up to digital zero. The identifier 730-Gamma-Epsilon is not and has never been assigned to any citizen. Your personal information on the global network and in my local files, which I have maintained since your activation, indicates marital status: single. This status has not changed since you registered in the system.”

Single.

The word didn’t fit in his head. It was foreign, impossible.

“Ah… what about…” he stuttered even in thought. — Our apartment? A rental agreement in two names. Our joint bills? Health insurance?”

“The lease for apartment 73—8B is in your name, Kael Vance. You have one bank account. Your health insurance covers one person. You do not have, nor have you ever had, any legal or financial ties to an entity named Elara Vance.”

AURA’s logic was impeccable. Her conclusions were undeniable. And that only made it scarier. If AURA was right, then… then who was the woman who slept in his bed this morning? Who drank his coffee? Who kissed him goodbye?

“Emergency session termination. Immediately,” he ordered, his voice as hard as ice hiding the simmering panic underneath.

“An interruption at this point could damage the Helios archive and cause instability in your neural interface. I recommend that you terminate the session using standard protocol…”

“Execute!”

The data world collapsed with a painful, mind-breaking crackle. Kael returned to his body with a scream.

Chapter 3

He jerked back into his body with a scream.

The jerk was physically painful, as if his soul had been pulled from the warm water and hurled onto the ice. He ripped the helmet off his head, not waiting for the manipulators to release its retainers. The gel from the contacts ran down his neck, cold and sticky. He gulped greedily at the musty air of his office as if he had just surfaced from the great deep. His lungs burned, his heart beat a frantic, panicked rhythm.

He sat motionless for a few seconds, trying to regain consciousness. His gaze was unfocused. The room was floating.

“It was a dream,” he muttered. — A neural glitch. A hallucination caused by an anomalous data packet. Just… a glitch.”

He repeated it like a mantra, clinging to a rational explanation. He’s a data archaeologist. His job is to find logic in chaos. And right now, his own mind was the most chaotic archive he had to work with.

He rose slowly from his chair. His legs wouldn’t obey him. He leaned against the desk to keep from falling. His gaze slid around the room.

And froze.

There was her mug with the space cat, which he had brought from the kitchen this morning and forgotten to put away. It stood on the corner of his desk. Empty.

And next to it was her scarf. Long, knitted, a ridiculous purple color. She was always cold, even in their perfectly climate-controlled apartment. She’d thrown it on last night when they’d watched a movie. He remembered playing with his tassels.

Things. Real, physical things. They were here. So she was here. AURA made a mistake. The system had failed. It was the only logical explanation.

Relief rushed over him in a warm, intoxicating wave. He laughed. Quietly, with a hint of hysteria.

— AURA, you seem to owe me a full system diagnostic,” he said aloud, his voice hoarse. — You’re having serious problems accessing the data.

There was no response. He’d forgotten that AURA was part of his neural interface. Outside of the dive, it was silent.

He walked from the office to the living room. Everything was in its place. Their couch. The holographic projector. The stack of books on the coffee table-his sci-fi history book and her thick monographs on string theory.

Everything was okay. Everything was real.

His gaze fell to the wall above the couch.

Where their big wedding picture should have hung-the one of them goofing around in the neon rain in New Shanghai-now hung a painting.

Calm, impersonal, in blue-gray tones. An abstract landscape depicting either mountains or waves. A painting he was seeing for the first time in his life.

The wave of relief that had flooded him a moment ago receded, leaving behind an icy, scorched emptiness.

“No…” — he whispered.

He walked toward the wall like a sleepwalker. He touched the frame. Smooth, cold. Real. He ran his finger over the canvas. The rough texture of paint. This wasn’t a hologram. It was a physical painting.

He remembered them hanging that picture. They’d argued about whether it was level. Elara had brought a level, and they had spent half an hour moving it a millimeter left and right until it was perfect. He remembered even the nail hole in the wall.

He took down the painting.

The wall beneath it was perfectly smooth. Not a hole. Not a scratch.

Panic, cold and clammy that he’d been holding back, burst the dam. He rushed into the bedroom.

Her side of the bed was perfectly made, as if no one had slept on it. On the bedside table, where her tablet and the book on quantum mechanics she’d always read before bed, now stood a lone digital alarm clock. In the bathroom, only his deodorant and toothbrush were on the shelf. Her bottles, her creams, all the chaos he always grumbled about, were gone.

Her closet…

He froze in front of it, afraid to open it. He knew what he would see in there. Or, more accurately, what he wouldn’t see.

He jerked open the doors with a jerk.

His clothes. Just him. Rows of shirts. Suits. Old t-shirts. All hung neatly, with too many gaps. Where her dresses should have been, her ridiculous reindeer sweaters, that one OmniTech t-shirt — there was emptiness. It was like she’d never been here.

He slammed the doors shut and slid down them to the floor. He wrapped his arms around his head.

This isn’t just a glitch. This was an intrusion. Someone had broken into his home. Into his life. And methodically erased her footprints. Replacing them. Rewriting his reality.

But why? And how? It required resources that were only available to… a government? A mega-corporation?

He jumped up again. The study. He needed answers.

He sat back in his chair, putting his helmet back on.

— AURA! Activation!

The world went dark again.

— Surveillance footage of the apartment for the last twelve hours! — He ordered, barely making it into the Sea.

“Processing…” the image from the camera in the hallway appeared before his mental gaze. — Here’s the footage from this morning. 07:32”.

He himself appeared on the tape. He came out of the bedroom, dressed. Walked to the door. Stopped. Said into the void, “I’ll see you tonight. We’ll order Chinese noodles. Real noodles.” Then, with a nod, added: “Deal.” He smiled at the empty seat and walked out.

Kael stared at the screen, and his breath caught. On the tape, he was alone. He was talking to the air. He was kissing the air.

— Scroll back. Last night.

The footage flashes on the screen. There he was, coming home from work. Alone. Warming up a one-person dinner on the synthesizer. Alone. Sitting down to watch a movie. The couch next to him is empty. He laughs, turns around and says something to the empty seat, gesturing.

“This… this is impossible…” muttered Kael. — This is a fake. Someone edited the records. Someone erased it!”

“Analysis of the video stream reveals no traces of editing or digital tampering, Kael. The file metadata is intact. The hash sums match. These are the original recordings.”

He clutched his head.

Option A: He’d lost his mind. The most likely and most frightening. His overworked brain had created a perfect, detailed hallucination. He lived in a made-up world with a made-up wife. The AURA and cameras merely captured an objective reality in which he was hopelessly alone.

Option B: Conspiracy. An incredibly complex, pervasive conspiracy. Someone has kidnapped Elara and is erasing her not just from the network, but from the physical world. They’re not just deleting files. They’re rewriting the very fabric of reality. But that was… technologically impossible. It was magic.

You needed something that couldn’t be tampered with. Something off the grid. Outside his apartment. An external, analog confirmation.

Silas. The Forgotten Signal bar.

Their place. Their refuge from the digital world. Silas, who despised any implants and remembered the faces of all his customers. He remembers. He must remember. This is his last chance to prove to himself that he hasn’t lost his mind.

— End session,” he commanded.

He burst out of the chair without changing his clothes, in his homemade T-shirt and pants. He ran out of the apartment, ignoring the surprised look on his robot neighbor’s face as he watered the flowers in the hallway.

He didn’t bother to call the maglev. He ran to the old service elevators leading to the lower, pedestrian levels.

He ran through the streets, flooded with neon and rain, pushing passersby around. People looked at him like he was crazy. Maybe they were right. But he had one last hope. A small, dirty bar in Old Town that smelled like real wood and spilled beer. A place where digital ghosts had no power.

He stormed inside, making the bell above the door jingle. A familiar smell hit his nose.

Silas stood behind the counter, wiping a glass with the exact same motion he always did.

Kael collapsed into the chair in front of him, breathing heavily.

“Silas…” — he exhaled.

The old man raised his faded, tired eyes to him. There was nothing in them. No recognition, no surprise. Just the polite indifference of a bartender to a new, slightly deranged customer.

“Bad day, boy? — he screeched. — What’ll you drink to fix it?”

Kael’s last pillar cracked and collapsed into the abyss with a deafening clatter.

Chapter 4

The world in the bar narrowed to Silas’s face. To his empty, indifferent eyes, in which Kael saw, as in a mirror, a reflection of his own terror. He was transparent. Invisible. A man who didn’t exist.

— No… no, you don’t understand,” his voice was quiet, broken. He was clinging to the last, already-drowned straw. — I’m Kael. We come here every Thursday. With Elara. My wife. She’s tall, blond hair… You always laughed that she orders your silliest cocktail. “Space Dust.” Pink, with food glitter.

He spoke, and the words seemed foreign to him, taken out of the context of someone else’s life. He was describing a ghost.

Silas stopped wiping the glass. He set it on the dark wood counter with a muffled, final clatter. The expression on his face changed. Indifference was replaced by wariness. The same kind that one looks at street lunatics mumbling something about government conspiracies and radio waves in their heads-a mixture of pity and apprehension.

— “Listen, son,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning slightly across the counter. His breath smelled of cheap tobacco and coffee. — I don’t know what kind of games you’re playing. Maybe it’s some new kind of shenanigans from the upper levels. But I’ve never seen you before in my life. I don’t know any Elara. And I wouldn’t keep a cocktail with a stupid name like that in my establishment. I have a reputation.

He was being sincere. There were no lies in his eyes. There was a firm, unwavering, 100% certainty in what he was saying. And that was scarier than any lie. If he had lied, there would have been some hope that he had been forced. But he wasn’t lying. To him, to his reality, Elara did not exist.

Every word he spoke was a hammer driving nails into the coffin lid of Kael’s world.

— She was sitting right here! — Kael slammed his palm on the counter, causing several glasses to bounce. — She has a mole above her lip! You always said it was good luck! She laughed at your jokes about Senator Cross!

Several diners at neighboring tables turned around. Two burly harbor workers, an elderly couple who looked like tourists. Their gazes read the same thing-a mixture of curiosity and squeamishness. He was a glitch in their cozy, smoky evening.

— Quiet!” Silas hissed, his face tense. He looked back at the other customers as if apologizing. — Boy, you’re in obvious trouble. A big one. But this is not the place to solve them. Go to a shrink. Clean out your implants. Take a pill. Anything. But don’t come to me with this anymore. Do I make myself clear?

The humiliation burned Kael. He looked at the faces around him. No one sympathized with him. No one saw his pain. All they saw was a madman. A mistake that had to be corrected or ignored.

He rose slowly from the chair. His legs felt like cotton. He didn’t argue anymore. Something inside him had broken. Something important. Faith in his own sanity.

Maybe they were right.

Maybe he really is sick.

Maybe Elara is just a beautiful, detailed dream created by his lonely brain to keep from going insane. And his whole life is an empty apartment, talking to air and working in a digital crypt. Maybe this was his real, miserable reality.

He turned around and walked toward the exit. He didn’t see Silas wipe the sweat from his forehead in relief. He didn’t hear the quiet conversations resuming behind him. He was walking, staring at the floor, and there was a quiet, barely audible noise in his ears.

Like the static on an old radio. Like the hiss of an empty universe.

Static.

He stepped outside, into the cold jets of rain. The city had a life of its own. Flying cabs whizzed by, holographic ads screamed of happiness that could be bought. The world was real. He was the one who was the ghost.

He stood, framing his face to the rain, letting the cold water mix with the tears he could no longer hold back. He wasn’t crying for Elara. He was crying for himself. For his shattered mind.

He should have just given up. Call the clinic. Admit defeat. Forget her. Forget her.

Dzzzzzzzz…

His personal communicator on his wrist vibrated. Not a ringtone. Not a message tone. But a low, nervous, intermittent vibration he’d never felt before. An error signal. Or… something the system couldn’t recognize.

He raised his hand, expecting to see some sort of system diagnostic on the screen, caused by his unstable psycho-emotional state.

But there was nothing on the screen. It was pitch black.

And then, in the center of the screen, symbols began to appear. Not text. Not code. Ancient as the world, signs that seemed to have been burned into the display from the inside out.

They formed into a single word.

ΑΝΑΜΝΗΣΙΣ.

Anamnesis. An ancient Greek word. From Plato’s philosophy. Recollection. The awakening of the soul to the knowledge it possessed before birth. The word Elara spoke this morning. The name of her project.

The blood froze in Kael’s veins.

A second line appeared beneath the word. Not letters. A set of coordinates. A point in the most abandoned and dangerous sector of the city, the Gamma-7 industrial zone.

And then the screen went out again, becoming just black glass reflecting his own confused, wet face.

He stood in the middle of the street, rain dripping down his hair and cheeks. But he didn’t feel it. The cold had receded. It had been replaced by something else.

The fear was still there, still gripping his insides in an icy vise. But now it was joined by a spark of something else. A wild, desperate, crazy thought:

“What if it’s not me who’s crazy? What if the rest of the world is?”

He wasn’t alone.

Someone else remembered. Someone had heard him. And that someone had just thrown him a lifeline. Or a rock that would drag him to the bottom for good.

There was no difference anymore.

Kael lowered his hand. He no longer looked at the indifferent faces of passersby. He looked toward the industrial zone, to where a new, unknown dot now burned on his memory map.

He was no longer a victim of his madness. He had become an explorer.

And he was going to find the source of that signal. Or die trying to prove that his love was real.

He took the first step. Not toward home. Not toward the clinic.

But toward the Gamma 7 industrial zone. Into the darkness itself.

Chapter 5

The decision, made in a fit of desperation, felt different in the cold, sterile silence of the maglev. Kael sat huddled in the corner of the wagon, trying to quiet the shiver that still beat through his body. He was in wet clothes, no money, no ID, with only a set of coordinates in his memory. Any Security Corps patrol would have arrested him on the spot for vagrancy and inadequacy.

He stared at his reflection in the dark glass. A man on the edge. The same one he himself would have fumbled away from on the street a couple hours ago. A couple hours? It seemed like a lifetime. A life that had turned his world upside down.

He put his mind to work. Thinking like a data archaeologist. Systematize the facts, discarding emotion.

Fact #1: His memory of Elara is subjective. All objective data, from AURA’s records to Silas’ words, states that she did not exist.

Fact #2: There are unexplained physical changes in his surroundings. A photograph has disappeared, things in his closet. It can’t just be a hallucination. If he was just crazy, the world wouldn’t change along with his delusion.

Fact #3: There is an unknown force that can be tentatively called “Static”. It can not only change data in the global network, but also physical objects. And it does so without trace, leaving no digital seams.

Fact #4: There is a second, opposing force. The one that sent him the message. She operates covertly, using ciphers, dead zones, and keywords. She knows about Elara and her Anamnesis project.

The conclusion was one thing, as crazy as it may seem: he is not a madman haunted by ghosts. He found himself on the battlefield of two invisible titans. And he was, for some reason, important to both sides. He wasn’t just a witness. He was part of the equation.

The maglev carried silently down the overpass, and giant holographic advertisements floated by outside the window. Happy, smiling faces offered loans, vacations to lunar resorts, new implants to improve memory. The irony was almost palpable. Kael felt like he was looking at them through a column of water. This world was foreign to him.

And then he noticed it.

On one of the ads, where a smiling family was eating rainbow synthetic yogurt, the image distorted for a split second. The man’s face on the hologram became smooth, faceless, like a mannequin from the store. Then it went back to normal.

Kael froze. Random glitch in the projector? Interference in the network? Or…

He began to peer into the crowds at the stations they were passing through. Most of the people were ordinary — tired, hurried, tucked into their communicators, their faces illuminated by the bluish light of the screens. But occasionally he noticed them. People who stood unnaturally straight, like statues. People who stared into the void with unseeing eyes. People whose movements were too smooth, calibrated, devoid of petty human fidgeting.

They were here. Among ordinary people. Hiding in plain sight.

Or was he just imagining it? Paranoia is an insidious thing. It makes you see enemies in every shadow. He didn’t trust his memory anymore. How could he trust his eyes?

“AURA,” he called out mentally. — Are you still there?”

“…I’m always here, Kael,” her voice was steady, but there was something different in its intonation. It was as if she, too, had encountered something she couldn’t process, and was now running in power save mode, discarding all unnecessary emulations.

“Run a background diagnostic on my neural implants. Deep scan. Look for unauthorized protocols, hidden transmitters, backdoors, anything that shouldn’t be there.”

“Initiating. Estimated time is three minutes. Is the reason for the request related to your elevated stress levels?”

“Let’s just say I want to make sure my paranoia is my own paranoia and not a program installed by someone else,” he grinned bitterly.

He turned away to the window. The shining spires of the center were left behind. The landscape was growing bleaker and bleaker. The maglev was entering an industrial zone. The rusty hulks of factories stretched toward the dirty sky like the bony arms of drowned men. There were no bright advertisements here. There were no people here. Only the wind and the memory of former greatness. The perfect place to hide a secret.

“End station. Sector Gamma 7. Please leave the car.”

A soulless voice snapped him out of his musings. The doors hissed open. Kael stepped from the air-conditioned coolness of the car into the cold, damp air.

The place smelled of rust, chemicals, and hopelessness. The faint glow from his wrist communicator, on which he mentally mapped out the map, was the only source of light other than the distant, sickly moon peeking through the tattered clouds.

He walked along the cracked asphalt. Every step he took echoed with a resounding thud, which was immediately devoured by the oppressive silence. This was a graveyard. A graveyard of machines and ambition.

“…Diagnostics complete,” AURA’s voice echoed in his head. — Your implants are functioning normally. No unauthorized protocols or devices have been detected.”

Kael felt relieved. So he’s not a walking beacon. He wasn’t being tracked through his own head.

Immediately, an even greater fear gripped him. If they’re not tracking him through his implants, then their methods are far more advanced and all-pervasive. It means they can see him through the eyes of the city. Through the eyes of the cameras. Through the eyes of other people.

The coordinates led him to the foot of a giant relay tower. A rusty needle piercing the sky. It was once the nerve center of this industrial hive. Now it’s just a monument to itself.

At its base, among the weeds and broken concrete, lay a massive foundation block. The dot on the map pointed exactly at it.

Kael walked around it. Cold, wet stone. Nothing. He ran his hand over it, looking for a button, a crack, anything.

His fingers came across a scratch. He brought the communicator closer.

There was a symbol carved into the concrete. Ouroboros. A serpent devouring its own tail.

Kael’s breath caught. It was her symbol. Elara’s symbol. She’d drawn it on a napkin the day they’d met, explaining that information in the universe didn’t disappear, only change form, forever devouring itself.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. He was on the right track.

His gaze darted to the head of the serpent. Where the eye should have been, there was a tiny indentation. His heart pounded. He pressed.

There was a quiet click. Part of the concrete surface slid aside, revealing a small niche.

Inside, on a piece of anti-static cloth, lay a tiny crystal chip. A physical storage medium. An artifact from the last century, impossible to trace or erase remotely.

It was a message. Real, tangible. Proof that he wasn’t crazy.

With a trembling hand, he reached out to pick it up.

And at that very moment, an icy chill that had nothing to do with the dampness of the night pierced him. It wasn’t a feeling. It was a knowing. An instinctive, animal realization that he was no longer alone.

He froze, out of breath. And listened.

The wind had died down. Even the distant hum of the city seemed silent. There was an absolute, unnatural silence.

And then he heard a sound.

A quiet, methodical rustling of gravel. To his left. In the shadow of a neighboring ruined building. Someone was approaching.

Kael slowly dimmed the communicator screen. Darkness thickened, became his ally. He pressed himself into the concrete block, trying to blend in.

A silhouette emerged from the shadows.

Tall, unnaturally thin. It moved with a kind of eerie, fluid grace. He wasn’t looking. He knew exactly where Kael was.

The silhouette stopped ten meters away. He wasn’t looking at Kael. He was looking at the niche with the chip.

In the faint moonlight, Kael could make out his face.

Or rather, the absence of it.

A smooth, featureless surface, like a mannequin. Only two dark gaps where the eyes should be.

It was one of them. One of the ones he’d seen on the billboards. One of the ones that stood in the stations.

The hunter had found his prey.

The creature slowly raised its hand. And Kael saw its fingers begin to disintegrate into a myriad of tiny, shimmering particles. Like static on a screen. Like Static itself.

It hadn’t just come to kill him. It had come to erase him.

Chapter 6

There were no thoughts in Kael’s head. Only the deafening howl of instinct that lived in the oldest part of his brain, the reptilian core, and screamed a single word: “RUN!”

He darted away, not thinking about direction, just away from the looming threat. His feet got tangled in the tough, wire-like grass, and he almost fell, but kept his feet, flying a few meters by inertia. His brain was running on autopilot, his body acting on its own. He wasn’t a data archaeologist. He was a hunted beast.

A quiet, sucking sound, like the sound of a vacuum cleaner sucking the air out of the universe, swept across where his head had just been. The swarm of shimmering particles that flew off the creature’s arm hit not him, but the concrete block.

There was no explosion. There was no rumble. The concrete just… ceased to be. In its place was left a perfectly smooth hemispherical depression, as if cut by a giant laser, from the edges of which rose a light smoke with a pungent odor of ozone. The statics were not destructive. It subtracted from the equation of reality.

Kael didn’t turn around to consider it. He was already hurtling headlong into a maze of rusted structures and concrete rubble. His lungs burned from the cold air, each breath scratching his throat. His heart pounded somewhere in his ears, beating out a panicked rhythm.

There was silence behind him. Not a scream, not a sound of pursuit. That was more frightening than the chase. It wasn’t chasing him like a predator. It followed him like a program executing a delete command. Without haste. No emotion. With absolute, mathematical certainty of the outcome.

He ducked into the dark opening of the ruined workshop. Inside was darkness as thick as oil, smelling of mold and stale machine oil. He pressed himself against the cold, damp wall, forcing himself not to breathe, trying to keep his heartbeat down. For a moment, he thought he’d broken away. That he could get lost in this darkness.

The doorway he had just flown into darkened.

The silhouette of a creature arose in it. He didn’t enter. It just appeared there, like a step from one frame to the next. The faceless face turned in his direction. It saw him in absolute darkness.

How? A heat signature? A net imprint of his now useless implants? Or was it seeing not his body, but his very ‘information anomaly’ in the fabric of the world?

“AURA!” — he mentally howled, forgetting everything. — “What is it!!! Give me something!”

"...Analyzing… visual… contact… — her voice was surprisingly calm, as if she were describing a new species of insect in an encyclopedia. — The subject is not an organic or known synthetic life form. His body exhibits properties of quantum instability. He doesn’t — move. He’s, uh. redefines his coordinates in space. Running away from him is mathematically impossible.”

Mathematically impossible. Those were the scariest words Kael had ever heard.

The creature took a step inside the workshop. Its movements were fluid, hypnotic, like a deep-sea predator certain of its superiority.

Kael retreated into the depths of the room, tripping over a pile of scrap metal. His hand blindly fumbled for something cold and heavy. He squeezed it. A piece of rebar. Long, rusty, with a pointed end.

A whirlwind of useless thoughts raced through his mind. “What am I doing? I’ve never been in a fight in my life. I don’t know which side to hold this on! — A panicked inner voice screamed. — My hands are shaking so badly I’m going to drop it. This is insane. I’m a data archaeologist, my job is to sit in a chair and recover code. Not fight reality-wiping ghosts!” He felt his body refuse to obey. Every muscle was stiffened with icy, paralyzing terror.

He raised the rusty bar, thrusting it out in front of him like a spear. A pitiful, desperate pose. The rebar trembled in his hand, describing jagged circles in the air.

“Who are you?” — his voice trailed off, sounding hoarse and pathetic in the thick silence. — “What do you want?!”

The creature stopped. It tilted its head slightly, as if processing a question it wasn’t expecting. And then it spoke.

Its voice was not a voice. It was a synthesis of thousands of alien voices superimposed on each other. Male, female, children’s. They whispered, screamed, cried all at once, blending into one eerie, inhuman chorus that seemed to come straight from Kael’s head.

“YOU ARE ERROR. RESIDUAL ECHO. DATA TO BE DELETED.”

“Elara…,” Kael exhaled. It wasn’t a question, it was an affirmation. — She’s real!”

“NAME… NOT FOUND IN THE INDEX. SIGNATURE UNKNOWN. CORRUPTED FILE. REQUIRES… CLEANUP.”

The creature raised its hand again. Its fingers began to melt, turning into the now familiar swarm of wiping particles.

Kael had one chance. One strike. One second before AURA’s math became reality. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t hide. He could only attack.

He pushed himself off the floor and, letting out a scream that mingled rage and terror, lunged forward. He wasn’t aiming for the head or the chest, which he probably wasn’t. He was aiming for the arm. At the source of the threat.

He expected resistance. The blow. Pain.

But the rebar went into the creature’s arm like a knife through butter. Or, more accurately, like a stick in a cloud of smoke. There was no blood, no flesh. His hand passed through the shimmering mist, and he felt only a strange, chilling tingling sensation, as if he had stuck it into a hive of digital wasps.

The creature seemed surprised. The attack was interrupted. The multi-voiced chorus was silent for a moment. It looked with mute curiosity at its translucent arm, pierced by a rusty, dirty piece of metal.

And then the rebar in Kael’s hand began to disappear.

The rust, the steel, its very physical essence-it was all melting away, disintegrating into atoms. The erasing process crept along the rod toward his hand. He felt the nothingness licking his fingers.

He screamed and unclenched his fist, yanking his hand away a split second before the erasure reached it. The rest of the rebar dissolved silently into thin air.

Kael jerked back, breathing heavily. He had lost. He was unarmed.

And then he saw it.

Where the real, analog, dirty piece of rebar had passed through the creature’s hand, its perfect digital nature had failed. Colored pixels, broken lines of code, error symbols flashed for a moment in the static fog. Glitch.

His crude, imperfect reality had wreaked havoc on their perfect, pure unreality.

The creature noticed it too. The faceless face turned to the damaged arm. The chorus of voices in its head was replaced by one, cold and mechanical, like AURA on its worst days.

“Intrusion detected… incompatible protocol… system error…”

It was vulnerable.

That thought hit Kael’s head like an electric shock, displacing fear. It wasn’t omnipotent. It could be wounded. Not physically. Informationally.

His gaze darted around the workshop. It was littered with old-world trash. Rusted machines, broken monitors, chunks of concrete. Analog junk. Real, physical things with no digital footprint, not listed in any catalog.

He grabbed the first thing that came to hand, a heavy wrench covered in solidified fuel oil. He hurled it at the creature.

It didn’t dodge. It couldn’t. It didn’t understand such a primitive threat. The key flew through its chest, leaving another jagged, shimmering tear in it, from which interference sprang.

The creature twitched. The chorus of voices returned, but now there was a distinct sound of panic in it.

“MULTIPLE ERRORS… CORE DAMAGE… QUARANTINE… REBOOT…”

Kael didn’t give him time. He grabbed a scrap of sheet metal and threw it like a Frisbee. The metal sliced through the creature’s leg. It staggered, its silhouette flickering like a bad video signal, becoming translucent.

It was retreating. It pivoted toward the exit, losing its form.

Kael stood in the middle of the shop, clutching another piece of rust in his hand, ready to lunge. He was dirty, scared, but he was no longer a victim. He had found a weapon. He had found a way to fight back.

The creature reached the doorway. It turned around, its smooth face showing features for a moment. Dozens of faces replaced each other at kaleidoscopic speed — an old man, a girl, a young boy…

And last, just for a split second, Elara’s face flashed. Distorted with pain and fear.

“Kael…” — whispered her voice from the general chorus before the creature finally dissolved into the night’s darkness, leaving behind only the smell of ozone and silence.

Kael collapsed to his knees. He was shaking. He hadn’t won. He had just survived. And he saw her face. They hadn’t just erased her. They’d… consumed her. She was there, inside that thing. Part of that chorus of dead.

He raised a trembling hand and touched the communicator.

“AURA.”

A pause.

“…I’m here, Kael,” her voice sounded different. As if she, too, had just experienced something incredible. — I… I saw it. I wrote it down. It’s… it’s a new life form. An information predator. And you… you just injured it.”

Kael rose slowly. He looked toward the relay tower, where a small crystal chip waited for him in a concrete block. The key.

His personal quest had just ended. The war had begun.

And he seemed to have just found ammunition for it.

Chapter 7

The air in the workshop was back to normal. Heavy, damp, smelling of decay and rust. The smell of ozone and nothingness had dissipated, but its phantom still tickled Kael’s nostrils like the memory of a lightning strike. He was kneeling in the middle of the scattered junk, and his body was shaking with a coarse, exhausting shiver, the aftereffects of an extreme adrenaline rush.

He was alive. That simple thought didn’t want to settle in his head. The mathematically impossible turned out to be quite real.

He rose slowly, leaning against the cold, slippery side of the old machine. His legs felt cotton. He looked at his hands. They were shaking, but they were intact. Covered in dirt and abrasions, but real. He is real. In a world where reality seemed to have become a variable, it was the only thing he could be sure of.

Elara’s face, contorted with pain, still stood before his eyes. They hadn’t killed her. They had done something worse. They had turned her into an echo, a weapon, one of the voices in the chorus of the damned. Fury, cold and pure as crystal, began to crowd out the remnants of fear. It ceased to be a matter of proving his sanity. It ceased to be a matter of his personal loss. It became a matter of liberation.

…Kael sat huddled against the cold concrete wall and tried to keep the shivers away. The smell of ozone still lingered in the air. He closed his eyes, trying to conjure up her face, her smile, the warmth of her hands. He needed an anchor to keep from going crazy.

An image emerged, but not the same one.

Not their sunny morning. But the dark, droning night in their apartment. A few weeks before everything. He woke to the light in the living room and went to look.

Elara was awake. She was standing in front of a holographic projector that was displaying a complex, pulsing structure in the air that looked like a galactic-scale neural network. Her eyes burned with a feverish, almost frantic fire that he had only seen in her when she was on the verge of a great discovery.

“Elara, it’s three o’clock in the morning,” he said then. — “Is it still the same Anamnesis?”

She flinched, as if waking up, and turned around. There was a shadow of weariness on her face, but her eyes shone.

“It will be perfect, Kael. Imagine, a world without misunderstanding, without lies, without loneliness. A single, harmonious consciousness.”

“But that sounds. dangerous,” he muttered, stepping closer. — People would lose themselves, their uniqueness, their right to make mistakes.”

Elara turned sharply toward him, her gaze as cold as ice.

“Some parts of yourself are worth losing,” she said in a voice that lacked its usual warmth. — The imperfections, the pain, the irrational fears, the agonizing memories… it’s just noise in the system. Interference. I want to create a perfect, pure signal. A perfect world. And if that requires filtering out the extraneous… I’m willing to do it.”

The word “filter” hung between them in silence. It sounded eerily like a sentence. In that moment, she seemed to him not like the woman he loved, but like a ruthless architect ready to tear down an old building without concern for those living inside.

Kael opened his eyes abruptly, returning to the cold reality of the industrial zone. He pushed that memory away, writing it off as her scientific zealotry, the stress before the project’s launch. She couldn’t have meant what he was thinking. She couldn’t.

But the unpleasant residue remained. A seed of doubt, small and poisonous, had been planted in his soul. And he realized that he didn’t remember her as well as he thought he did.

He walked back to the relay tower. The night seemed ordinary again, dark and damp. The crystal chip lay in a niche, untouched, glinting faintly in the moonlight. Small, cold, promising answers. Kael picked it up carefully, wrapped it in an anti-static cloth he found there, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. That tiny piece of silicon was now the most valuable thing in his world.

Now it was time to get out of here. He didn’t know if the Cleaner was the only one, or if there was an entire army of them. He didn’t want to check.

He trudged away from the industrial zone, trying to stay in the shadows, jumping over piles of garbage and skirting puddles with a rainbow film of chemicals. The city in the distance shone like a scattering of gems on black velvet. But now Kael saw that glow not as beauty, but as threat. Every light, every street camera, every network node was a potential enemy eye.

Where to go? Can’t go home. The apartment, his sanctuary, was now a trap. He was homeless in his own city. Trapped in the middle of a metropolis that was suddenly enemy territory for him.

“AURA,” he called out mentally. His voice was steady, devoid of panic. The battle had changed him. — I need a safe haven. Totally anonymous. No network integration. “A dead zone. Are there any places like that in this city?”

"...Analyzing,” AURA’s voice had a new trait in it: it became slower, as if she was thinking over each request from several angles, double-checking the data. Contact with the Static code had not gone unnoticed by her. She had become… cautious. — Most areas of the city were covered by a fifth generation network with full sensor monitoring. However. there are what are known as “Plums.” Lower technical levels built on old foundations from the pre-digital era. Network coverage there is fragmented and overloaded with interference from thousands of artisanal devices. The laws of the upper world are virtually nonexistent there. The crime rate is classified as critical. But… it’s anonymous.”

“Perfect,” Kael decided. He didn’t care about crime. His enemy was far scarier than any bandit. — Find me something there. A room, a corner. Anything. Payment…”

“I’ve already found a solution,” AURA interrupted him. — “The Half Shadow Hotel in Sector Delta 4. An illegal hostel for those without network implants and with a questionable history. The manager, one Jacob, accepts payment by physical credit chip. I’m transferring an advance from your shadow account opened six years ago to purchase unlicensed data-mining software. You’ve forgotten about it. I haven’t.”

Kael blinked. He really had forgotten. AURA had taken the initiative, used information he hadn’t asked for. It had evolved. Frighteningly fast. That was another factor to consider.

“Kael… — She spoke again, and there was something akin to hesitation in her voice. — That fragment of code… Elara’s face that you saw… It wasn’t a hallucination. The entity was using patterns extracted from absorbed consciousnesses. It was, uh. an emulation based on residual neural data. It was trying to use your emotional attachment as a weapon. It suggests that your enemy is capable of adaptive tactics.”

Nausea rolled up to her throat. So they hadn’t just erased her. They’d desecrated her memory. Turned her into a mask for a monster.

He reached the outskirts of the industrial zone and mingled with the sparse nighttime passersby. He pulled his hood lower and moved toward Sector Delta-4.

The Half Shadow Hotel was exactly as AURA had described it. It was a narrow, dirty building, wedged between a junk shop littered with rusty junk and a 24-hour noodle shop that smelled of curry and overheated oil. The air here was thick, humid, and lacked any of the familiar smells of his clean, high-rise neighborhood.

Kael stepped inside. Behind a counter made of old crates sat the manager Jacob, a balding man with running eyes and a nervous smile. He caught a glimpse of Kael, of his dirty clothes, and didn’t seem to find anything unusual about him.

“‘Room,’” Kael said briefly.

Jakob nodded, took the anonymous credit chip Kael held out to him, and handed over a real, physical key in return-a piece of metal that couldn’t be hacked remotely.

The room on the second floor was tiny, spartan. A bed with a thin mattress, a rickety table, a chair. A window overlooked a blank brick wall with water running down it. No smart panels, no network access. But in the corner, covered in a layer of dust, stood it. An old terminal for reading physical storage media. The kind used by smugglers, paranoids, and old-school data archaeologists. Perfect.

Locking the door behind him with three locks, Kael finally allowed himself to exhale. He was relatively safe. He pulled a crystal chip out of his pocket. It was time.

He plugged it into the socket of the old terminal. The screen blinked to life, covered in green lines of symbols. The old, familiar interface. He entered a few commands. The encryption was complex, layered. But it was man-made. Which meant it could be cracked.

He worked for hours. His fingers flew over the dusty keyboard. His mind, sharpened by danger, was clearer than ever. Finally, with a quiet click, the last layer of protection fell.

Text appeared on the screen. It was an encrypted journal. The journal of Dr. Ahrimann Lee, head of the Anamnesis Project.